Yahoo! News

Yahoo News - Latest News & Headlines

Tehran and Washington have this month been escalating rhetoric against each other, following U.S. President Donald Trump's decision to try to cut Iran's oil exports to zero and beef up the U.S. military presence in the Gulf in response to what he said were Iranian threats. The officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said the request had been made by U.S. Central Command, but added that it was not clear whether the Pentagon would approve the request. The Pentagon regularly receives - and declines - requests for additional resources from U.S. combatant commands throughout the world.

WASHINGTON (AP) — New charges filed against WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange quickly drew alarm Thursday from media organizations and others. The groups are concerned that the Justice Department is charging Assange for actions that ordinary journalists do routinely in their jobs.

For the purposes of Lockheed's marketing campaign, the F-21 is a new fighter, although it shares many of its major features with the F-16V the company has sold to Bahrain, Greece, Slovakia, South Korea and Taiwan. Lockheed can build new F-16Vs or upgrade older F-16s to the V-standard.Lockheed Martin is developing a new variant of its iconic F-16 single-engine fighter in order to compete in India’s 2019 tender for 110 new warplanes.(This first appeared earlier in the month.)But don’t count on the American firm’s “F-21” to win the contract.According to journalist Angad Singh, the likely winner is French company Dassault’s Rafale twin-engine fighter.Singh explains his rationale in the May 2019 issue of Combat Aircraft magazine. India previously ordered 36 Rafales as part of an earlier fighter tender. “With 36 aircraft already on order and the infrastructure in place for an additional 36, a case could certainly be made that training, basing and sustainment costs for additional aircraft would not be an impossible burden.”Other candidates for the Indian tender are the Saab Gripen from Sweden, the European Eurofighter Typhoon, the MiG-35 from Russia and the Boeing Super Hornet from the United States. Whichever fighter New Delhi selects, it needs the new jets now, according to Singh.

Last year 19 million applied for 63,000 positions at Indian Railways. Non-farm sectors are hampered by stringent labour laws and insufficient investment in skills, according to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. Many of those looking for work are those escaping from a dire crisis gripping Indian agriculture that has driven thousands of farmers to suicide in recent years.

Climate change has long been a disaster in the making, but until recently the American public tended to treat it as an afterthought. The Green New Deal brought climate change front and center, and made Americans think about big bold solutions instead of technical tweaks and half measures. The think tank Data for Progress has a plan that actually predates Ocasio-Cortez’s, but which goes into much greater detail about how to combat climate change both at home and abroad.

While abortion is legal nationwide, Americans have unequal access to the procedure, depending on their location in the United States and how much they are able to spend. The disparities are great indeed, from the more than 150 abortion clinics available in the most populous state of California, to only one in states like Mississippi in the South or Missouri in the Midwest. State laws also vary widely on other matters like speed limits for drivers and marriage age requirements, but the Supreme Court has set a "minimum standard throughout the entire country," noted Meg Penrose, of the Texas A&M School of Law.

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — This story was first published on Dec. 21, 2001, when AP journalist Justin Pritchard reported on the American Taliban fighter John Walker Lindh's journey to the Taliban front lines. We are reprinting the story now to mark Lindh's release after nearly two decades in prison.

The Federal Aviation Administration is meeting with international air regulators from around the world on Thursday to determine what is needed to return the grounded Boeing Co 737 MAX to return it to service. The agency will summarize the status of three major ongoing reviews of the 737 MAX and give an update of the recertification process and shed light on Boeing's proposed revisions to its software and pilot training. Acting FAA Administrator Dan Elwell said on Thursday he thought travelers in the United States and around the world would respect any eventual decision by the FAA to return the plane to service.

President Trump issued a memo on Thursday granting attorney general William Barr the authority to declassify all documents related to the FBI's surveillance of his campaign in 2016.The memo also instructs all intelligence-community officials to cooperate with Barr in his investigation into the origins of the counterintelligence investigation into the Trump campaign and its alleged ties to Russia.“The heads of elements of the intelligence community . . . and the heads of each department or agency that includes an element of the intelligence community shall promptly provide such assistance and information as the Attorney General may request in connection with that review," the memo reads.In a statement released on Thursday evening, White House press secretary Sarah Sanders argued that the declassification was both in keeping with precedent and necessary to provide the public with answers about whether the FBI's probe was tainted by partisanship.“The Attorney General has also been delegated full and complete authority to declassify information pertaining to this investigation, in accordance with the long-established standards for handling classified information," the statement read. “Today’s action will help ensure that all Americans learn the truth about the events that occurred, and the actions that were taken, during the last Presidential election and will restore confidence in our public institutions."House Intelligence Committee chairman Adam Schiff lashed out at Trump in response to the memo, which he cast as part of the administration's concerted effort to distract from the Mueller report itself by impugning the motivations of the investigators who eventually produced it.> While Trump stonewalls the public from learning the truth about his obstruction of justice,> > Trump and Barr conspire to weaponize law enforcement and classified information against their political enemies.> > The coverup has entered a new and dangerous phase.> > This is un-American.> > -- Adam Schiff (@RepAdamSchiff) May 24, 2019Top Democrats have lambasted Barr for his use of the term “spying” to describe the surveillance the FBI conducted on the Trump campaign.“I think spying did occur. The question is whether it was adequately predicated,” Barr testified last month, after announcing that he had formed a team within the Department of Justice to investigate the matter.